With the proliferation of online data storage (e.g., using file servers, cloud providers, etc.), there is usually no consistent way to add custom information to a file, such as metadata, that can be accessed easily by remote devices. For example, remote directory listings usually only return standard information for electronic files, such as the filename, the file type (e.g., a text file (.txt), a Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheet (.xls), Adobe Acrobat PDF (.pdf), etc.) and the file size. Access to other custom information may not be not available in a standard directory listing. Further, to the extent that directory information is even available, it is usually not consistent across different products and platforms. For example, even for an identical file on both a Microsoft® server and Dropbox™, different information is available: from the Windows® server, a requesting device can not deduce whether a thumbnail exists, and file attributes are not available from Dropbox™. Additionally, moving files between different platforms (e.g., between a Microsoft® server and Dropbox™) risks losing portions of metadata associated with the file. Also, it is often difficult and impractical (e.g., for scalability reasons) to modify an underlying product to provide additional data about the files.
Metadata can be added to an electronic file by storing it in the electronic file itself. The metadata can be encoded in both a standard formats (e.g., as tags used in most Windows® document types) or custom formats (e.g., particular to the file or the operating system). However, storing the metadata in the file requires client software to download the file (or at least parts thereof) to access the metadata. Therefore, additional data download may be required to access the metadata, which requires a further network step, which can in-turn slow down transactions and increase the amount of data transferred over a potential pay per byte connection. In addition, metadata for different files may be encoded in different formats, requiring custom code for each format to extract the meta data.